When you put a telephone line into a nic... and the voltage on the phone line fries your nic_________________Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

When youre thinking your server is acting strange,
but you are really not ssh'd in and just scanning around your own hd

I've done that and the opposite many times. One time at work I meant to start a new X server on my laptop, but I was in a terminal that was logged into one of the servers. Guess whee the X server started. Had to get the sysadmin to kill it (don't know if it would have been much of a problem anyways, but still).

When youre thinking your server is acting strange,
but you are really not ssh'd in and just scanning around your own hd

I've done that and the opposite many times. One time at work I meant to start a new X server on my laptop, but I was in a terminal that was logged into one of the servers. Guess whee the X server started. Had to get the sysadmin to kill it (don't know if it would have been much of a problem anyways, but still).

I've shutdown a server with 88 days uptime 30 miles away with that trick...

I regularly set the wrong computer to do updates, but thats not nearly as bad._________________"Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside." - A Scanner Darkly By PK Dick

When youre thinking your server is acting strange,
but you are really not ssh'd in and just scanning around your own hd

I've done that and the opposite many times. One time at work I meant to start a new X server on my laptop, but I was in a terminal that was logged into one of the servers. Guess whee the X server started. Had to get the sysadmin to kill it (don't know if it would have been much of a problem anyways, but still).

I've shutdown a server with 88 days uptime 30 miles away with that trick...

I regularly set the wrong computer to do updates, but thats not nearly as bad.

Wow. Did it just suck up resources or was something else going on to make it crash?

Fortunately, this was a thin-client server, so it was supposed to be doing X-type stuff (minus actually running a real X server). I could have done it on the webserver...

...you install a new NIC, beat your head against the wall for 20 minutes trying to figure out why its not pulling an IP...then rememeber that your filtering the MAC addresses on your network.

What's your indication you're having a long day?

Did that yesterday actually..._________________72 of Pitcairn Islands 49 inhabitants use Seti@Home
"If you buy a DVD you have a copy. If you want a backup copy you buy another one."
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...you dork around with a slow public proxy server for 2 hours because apache isn't accepting connections outside of the nat, only to realize that it's because your iptables rule opening port 80 is after the rule dropping packets headed for ports 0:1023. Ugh.

I've shutdown a server with 88 days uptime 30 miles away with that trick...

I regularly set the wrong computer to do updates, but thats not nearly as bad.

Wow. Did it just suck up resources or was something else going on to make it crash?

It was perfectly stable and should have managed another 88 days but I was tired and typed "halt" into what I thought was my desktop's terminal only to realise that the terminal was SSH'ed into the server. I was not pleased._________________"Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside." - A Scanner Darkly By PK Dick

I've shutdown a server with 88 days uptime 30 miles away with that trick...

I regularly set the wrong computer to do updates, but thats not nearly as bad.

Wow. Did it just suck up resources or was something else going on to make it crash?

It was perfectly stable and should have managed another 88 days but I was tired and typed "halt" into what I thought was my desktop's terminal only to realise that the terminal was SSH'ed into the server. I was not pleased.

This is a duplicate of the The Official Dumb Mistakes Thread (TM) but that thread is getting long so I locked it and am making this the official The Official Dumb Mistakes Thread (TM) part deaux. I took the liberty of changing the Thread title to reflect that._________________Gentoo: it's like wiping your ass with silk.

When you put a telephone line into a nic... and the voltage on the phone line fries your nic

I known phone-lines work on ~40V and an RJ45 connector is similar to the RJ?? used by phones
but surely NIC makers would put crowbar cct on their inputs?_________________The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter
Great Britain is a republic, with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king

...when your'e setting up the master node on the brand spanking new computing cluster, need a temporary IP to start installing things, use nslookup to doublecheck that the IP on a specific machine is not in use, nslookup fails and instead spits out the DNS IP, you happily set the new machine up statically with the DNS IP, and thus route the entire university network traffic through a semi installed Linux machine (i.e. kill it altogether).

I've mentioned this in another thread, but my stupidest Linux mistake so far was doing an emerge -uDN world for the first time after about 4 months on a Stage 3 networkless install (ie using only the binary packages that were on the CD). That wasn't the mistake - the mistake was a few days later when it had finished updating, running etc-update and deciding that I wasn't going to work my way through that huge list so I would just -5 it. Everything went well until the next morning when I booted up and realised that I'd deleted every single config file and I couldn't even get to a shell nevermind X. Had to boot a live cd and spend a few hours redoing all my configs.

When I first installed Linux back in December, I didn't know I would be switching over to Linux full time, so when I got my new HD (120 gig), I gave Windows a generous 90 gig of that and Linux the rest. As time went on, I kept giving Windows less and Linux more (I ended up installing several distros of Linux and FreeBSD). Normally, I would either use the Mandrake install CD or QtParted. But one day, I though I could handle doing it from the commandline using ntfsresize and cfdisk. I resized the filesystem, but forgot exactly how much I shrunk it. So I made an approximate guess and used that in cfdisk. Windows didn't boot. So I put the partition back to the original size. Windows doesn't boot. And half the time, I can't even read the NTFS partition from Linux. Years of mp3s and documents and other stuff was on there, so I wasn't happy. Fortunately, I still had the old HD, so I plugged it in, used ntfsclone to copy it back over and voila, Windows worked. I lost a little bit of stuff (changes I had made since I got the new HD), but these were trivial.

But my woes of resizing Windows partitions didn't end there. On my laptop, where my harddrive has a pitiful 27 gig, of which 21 gig was devoted to Windows (and 300 meg to swap for Linux, leaving a paltry 2 gig for my /home partition and 5 gig for everything else), I decided it was time to repartition as well. I wanted to take a gig from Windows, increase the swap space to 400 meg so I could do swsusp2 (which didn't end up working ) and put the rest into making my Linux partition more reasonable in size. Well, having learned from my mistakes, I used QtParted. I resize the NTFS partition, it chugs for a while and then it's done. But it doesn't look like it's done. The partition size hasn't changed. I figure it just resized the FS and I have to manually resize the partition (I know it sounds stupid, but in retrospect, I thought QtParted was broken -- I thought it did actually resize the FS, but just forgot to resize the partition). So I manually resized it to the exact size (or so I thought). Windows doesn't boot. I resize it back to what it was. Windows doesn't boot. Says unmountable root volume. Fuck, I think to myself, because unlike with my desktop, I don't have an old HD with all my laptop stuff on it. Well, it turned out in cfdisk, I didn't commit the changes, so it was still the new shrunken size. I resize it back to the old size AND commit the changes. Reboot. Windows doesn't boot. Fuck squared. Back to Linux. I check out ntfsprogs and see what I can do. There's an ntfscheck utility. I run that. I cross my fingers. Windows seems like it's not booting, but then when it would normally say "can't boot", it sounds like it's running a scandisk (no output for some reason). It reboots automatically and I boot into Windows and I get the "Windows needs to check your disk". It does that, I reboot again and Windows works.

But I still want to resize the partition. It turns out QtParted does work. You just have to commit the changes. All that chugging that it was doing was just ntfsresize doing a pretend run. I thought it was doing actual work. Anyways, I commit the changes, an hour later, my partition is properly resized. I spend a few hours copying the Linux stuff to my desktop, repartitioning the Linux part and then resizing the Linux part of the HD (just one big partition plus a swap partition) and then copying stuff back over. Disaster averted.